From: Miriam English (miriam@werple.net.au)
Date: Wed Oct 10 2001 - 03:09:15 MDT
At 01:09 PM 10/10/2001, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>Colin Hales wrote:
> > Way out there: miniaturise the whole shbang and inplant in brain with
> > neural/electronics interface and we have telepathy, do we not? Extropian
> > style evolutionary pressure++, I'd have thought.
>
>Higher-bandwidth telepathy. Telepathy by itself is just getting those
>neural/electronics interfaces worked out and transmitting via radio,
>no quantum stuff needed.
>
>A lot of the apps I've seen suggested by communicating through
>entangled pairs can also be done with lower-tech data communication.
>All this does is make the communication instantaneous, but speed of
>light is often fast enough for short-range versions of the same.
Heck, I'd settle for speed of sound if I could directly transfer
thoughts/images/concepts to another mind. I suspect the problem is going to
be interfacing at each end rather than the transmitting between.
The way I see it eventually happening is that we will each wear our own
computer which constantly watches the electrical actions in our brains in
microscopic detail. These computers will be AIs in their own right and will
gradually come to learn what parts of our brains correspond to what
thoughts/emotions/perceptions/movements. They will quite literally read our
minds. Unlike our wetware they will be able to transmit the mental info to
other people's computers which will be able to map the data to their host
brain's topology and stimulate them directly in the corresponding regions.
Even with this degree of communication things are not so cut and dried
though. How does one computer communicate color info to someone who is
color blind? I am sure there would be some data that would not be able to
be transferred properly because some people might have sufficiently
dissimilar backgrounds that nothing quite matches up, however there may be
some way of extrapolating such difficult experiences back to basic sensory
data. For instance if someone wants to communicate their love of custard
apples they could send the flavor of custard apple as basic taste data,
then adding emotional overtones in -- where they were the first time they
tasted it, how happy they were, and a lot of other subconscious emotional
baggage that goes with the experience.
I think the most useful aspect would be teaching of concepts. These are
often the most tricky to get across to others via language. However with
that comes the risk that it also becomes wonderful indoctrination
machinery. It would be very easy to impart pathological fears or hatred,
though presumably the AIs would have safeguards... people will not likely
be too happy about exposing their most valuable organ to that kind of risk.
Much could be communicated because a lot of experiences are shared by us
all, but it wouldn't be the solution to all communications.
I think it's a long way away... 50 years????
Cheers,
- Miriam
---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=------
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
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http://werple.net.au/~miriam
http://members.optushome.com.au/miriame
Virtual Reality Association http://www.vr.org.au
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